Meet the new, sensitive GOP. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty Images)
29 September 18
ost
weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with
contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture.
Today, the Senate testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett
Kavanaugh.
Going into the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, critics questioned the choice of Republicans to cede many of their questions to Rachel Mitchell, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor. Was the hearing fair?
The hearing was a travesty, at once tragic, corrupt, and hateful.
The decision of the 11 Republican men on the committee to delegate their questioning to a prosecutor Mitch McConnell called a “female assistant”
wasn’t even the most outrageous aspect of the proceedings. It says much
about the hearing as a whole that while Mitchell did the men’s dirty
work — failing to pursue any evidence that might corroborate Christine
Blasey Ford’s narrative (e.g., a conspicuous entry in Kavanaugh’s Summer of ’82 calendar) — she too was in the end was belittled for the failing of being a woman. Banished to her seat at the children’s table soon after Kavanaugh started to testify,
she sat in humiliated silence while Lindsey Graham and his bros took
over the questioning to beat up on Ford in absentia once her testimony
had ended.
The ways in which this shitshow was not fair are many.
A fair hearing would have called witnesses, and not just Mark Judge, to
testify under oath about the incidents ostensibly being adjudicated, so
that their unvetted public statements could be subject to
cross-examination. A fair hearing would not have subjected a
sexual-assault victim to a sex-crimes prosecutor while shielding the
accused from equal scrutiny. A fair hearing would not have allowed men,
from the doddering, filibustering chairman Chuck Grassley to Kavanaugh
himself, to interrupt, condescend to, and talk over the questioners,
particularly women on the committee. A fair hearing might also have been
abetted by a coordinated line of inquiry from the Democrats, who often
repeated each other’s questions (netting the identical answers) instead
of collaborating on a comprehensive strategy that would advance the
unraveling of Kavanaugh’s dishonest defense. Indeed, the Democratic men
would have been well advised — as some had suggested — to turn over most
of the questioning to Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris, experienced
prosecutors who in their allotted five minutes each drew blood and forced Kavanaugh to bare his teeth in contempt of their gender. But alas, Democratic men will also be men. Each needed his moment center stage. So instances of Kavanaugh’s lying, including those not directly related to Ford’s testimony, both in real time and in the past, went largely unmentioned and unaddressed. The Democrats also failed to debunk Kavanaugh’s
repeated misrepresentation that Ford’s friend Leland Keyser had
rebutted her account of what happened that summer night in 1982.
Jill Abramson, the co-author (with Jane Mayer) of Strange Justice, the definitive account of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill debacle, had it right when she wrote on the eve of this hearing that it had a “predetermined outcome.”
Like the 1991 template, in which the showily pious Republican senator
John Danforth served as a beard for his peers’ cynicism, the 2018 replay
had the window dressing of its own moralistic Hamlet, Jeff Flake.
Donald Trump’s views are notoriously influenced by how things look on TV. With the country watching, how did Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford do?
By many accounts, even Trump was somewhat disarmed by Ford’s testimony
— at least enough so to worry, with good reason, that she might impress
most of those watching (if not his own base) as credible, courageous,
and deeply moving. He was worried as well because in his view Kavanaugh’s pre-hearing prime-time appearance on Fox News had been a flop. He didn’t like his nominee’s PR strategy of presenting himself as a choirboy.
The Kavanaugh that emerged at the hearing
understandably was much more to Trump’s liking — he dropped the Mr. Nice
Guy pose and let his full Trump roar. He emerged as a bully, a
screamer, a conspiracy theorist, a rabid partisan, and a guilt-free
purveyor of falsehoods big and small (including about instantly Google-able definitions of sexual terms he used in his high-school yearbook).
For all his self-congratulation about the many (good-looking) women he has appointed clerks,
he also behaved like an unalloyed misogynist. In his Fox News
interview, he had revealed his contempt for women subtly — by stepping
in to man-answer a question the interviewer posed to his wife. In the
hearing, he did just what Trump would do: accusing a woman who dared question him (Klobuchar) of the accusation she had raised about him (drinking to excess).
If anything, he out-Trumped Trump in one area: While Trump is a
teetotaler, Kavanaugh has the personality of a raging, self-pitying,
out-of-control drunk. (He seems to think drinking doesn’t count as long
as it’s beer.) As he tried to shut Klobuchar down with his bullying and
bellowing, it was all too easy to visualize him pushing his hand on the
teenage Ford’s mouth to stop her from screaming for help during an
attempted rape.
It was hardly a surprise that Kavanaugh said he didn’t
deign to watch Ford’s testimony.
Trump didn’t think John McCain was a hero, but he was
thrilled by Kavanaugh. No wonder. Kavanaugh stood up to Ford and his
other accusers as Trump has to the nearly two dozen women (we know
about) who have accused him of sexual assault.
In light of a NPR/PBS
NewsHour/Marist pre-hearing poll showing that a majority (54 percent) of Republicans believe that Kavanaugh should be on the court even if it’s true that he assaulted women,
he is the ideal Supreme Court justice for the party of Trump. We should
not forget, however, that this misogynist culture ruled the GOP well
before Trump came along: Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Lindsey Graham,
among so many others, were there first.
Whether in the Senate chamber or out in America, what has this hearing changed, and what has it not?
About the only positive change to come out of this
hearing — and I am being facetious — is that we now know that Republican
men have been carefully schooled on how to profess “respect” for female
victims of sexual assault. They have become expert at intoning that
they care about rape victims because they are speaking “as the father of
daughters” — as if those of us who are the fathers of sons, or those
men who aren’t fathers at all, needn’t give a damn about women who are
abused by men. These senators’ behavior at the hearing amply
demonstrated that they don’t mean a word of the flowery sentiments some
strategist has forced them to memorize. As committee chairman, Grassley
set the tone. “You got what you wanted — I’d think you’d be satisfied,”
he snapped at Klobuchar as if she were a maidservant after she thwarted
his attempt to bulldoze her. Out in the hallway during a break, Lindsey Graham “praised” Ford by calling her “a nice lady”; Hatch’s term of choice was “attractive.”
The guiding principle of the hearing, subscribed to by all of these
Republican senators, was that men are the victims most worthy of our
sympathy in sexual assaults, not women. The grievance of white male
victimization — by women, by minorities, by elites — is Trumpism at its
ugliest core.
More than a quarter-century later, it feels as if very
little has changed since Clarence Thomas was elevated to the court,
#MeToo notwithstanding. Had Ford not been white — and from the
professional class — you have to wonder whether the Republican men on
the committee would have completely dropped their patently phony
pretense of concern for her welfare and stabbed her in the front instead
of the back. What will follow now is a national tsunami of rage much as
there was after the sliming of Anita Hill. And the aggrieved will not
just be those “suburban women” politicos keep pigeon-holing, but most
women, and more and more men. We have to hope that this rage will sweep
more women into office as it did in 1992, the so-called Year of the
Woman. And sweep some women out, too, including Susan Collins, whose
tired act — repeated, feckless expressions of being “concerned” about
Trumpian horrors while doing nothing about them — should be punished by
Maine’s voters when she’s up for reelection in 2020.
What an awful day. My colleague at Veep, the
showrunner David Mandel, is a master of finding dark humor in Washington
horrors, but he reflected my mood, and I imagine that of many, when he
said after these hearings that “it’s starting to seem like it was an
accident that the country worked as long as it did.” As I write, there’s
a faint hope Kavanaugh will not make it to the Court. There’s a less
faint hope that the GOP will lose control of at least one chamber of
Congress in November.
But even if those battles are won, the fact remains
that America has a major political party more dedicated than ever to
stripping women of power by any ruthless means it can.
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